2020 Update:
Used Lifesum for over a year. Finally found a good replacement. All the bugs drove me away, especially it’s glitches with syncing activity data, lack of Strava sync, the horrible food database (most items are completely wrong), and the challenging user interface. Switching to ‘Lose It!’ Which bills itself as a weight loss app but is actually a VERY good macro manager. I hadn’t looked into Lose It! Because I don’t want to lose weight – glad I finally did. So much better!!
Bottom Line:
An elegant interface but significantly flawed and inaccurate implementation make it easy to get the wrong results. I love the idea but the bugs and incorrect data must be fixed before Lifesum can be used effectively.
The good:
Elegant user interface that is easy to understand and makes it clear where my nutrition is, both at the meal and day level.
Fun and easy to understand goals.
Nice selection of meal plans and goals, and easily customized. I particularly like the Scandinavian plan.
A reasonable price for an annual subscription, which is necessary for Apple Health syncing.
The bad:
Lifesum will count a single workout twice or even three times if you have more than one data source reporting the same workout. For instance if your Apple Watch logs exercise and you also track your workout in, say, Fitbod, then Lifesum will double count the calories and throw your nutrition way off. Apple Health avoids this problem by prioritizing one source over another, but Lifesum isn’t that smart. It makes the app unusable if you track your exercise.
Not enough information about the meal plans and goals. Unclear why certain macro levels are selected.
The app incorrectly calculates using different measurements. For instance “2% Organic Milk” is 14 calories per ounce, and 1772 calories per tablespoon. (So 1 tablespoon of milk gives me 118g protein, 192g carbs, and 73g fat!)
Sometimes the app gets very confused about time and loses a day’s with of information. Right now it’s Wednesday. The app is showing me information for Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday (tomorrow)... and Wednesday appears to have no data. When I check back on Sunday, now Thursday shows no data in the log even though I logged every day this week. Very glitchy.
Search does not work well. For example “blueberries” returns things like “bluebbery pie” but not berries; strangely, searching “blueberry” returns “blueberries” at the top of the list. Finding the right food is often a frustrating exercise.
Many barcoded items are incorrect. I’ve scanned several and found the nutritional data to be completely wrong. This means I have to create my own food, and remember to avoid the barcode scan. Identifying foods with bad nutritional data is constant and tedious.
There is no way to correct bad nutritional data in the database (there is a “report” function but I have yet to see anything actually be corrected after making a report). Lifesum should consider not publishing every food people enter in their app – most foods have incorrect nutritional info, many are rife with spelling errors, etc.
There are many duplicate food items, most of which are wrong. It’s always a challenge to find an accurate food item when wading through multiple, incorrect, versions of the same food. (Workaround: only use food items you create yourself and store in favorites – but that makes the food database useless).
Too much clicking to perform repetitive tasks. Should be much easier to log the same data several times during the week.
The menu management is confusing and doesn’t let me create complete meals. For instance I can create a “pasta and sauce” recipe and a “cookies” recipe but I cannot add recipes to a “meal.” This means tracking my actual meals is a repetitive process where I have to pick all the specific recipies and add in ingredients. Why can’t I create a meal from several recipes and reuse that meal?
The user interface, while elegant, is a bit buggy. There are several pages with no exit method, although there is actually a hidden “back” button. Swiping down a little to vigorously often cancels everything you have been working on logging. Text entry is glitchy. The slide-up keyboard obscures controls making it difficult to navigate. Sometimes you have to touch around the screen to get the “next” button to appear. If you have an iPhone X, the back and cancel buttons at the top of the screen are too close to the phone controls so half the time you end up exiting the app. Most annoying is the depth you have to navigate to when creating food items. Lots of unnecessary tapping.
Lifesum does NOT sync water from Apple Health... so it’s always wrong if you track water in other apps. This makes me wonder what other things it should (but does not) read from Health.
Related to the last point: Since the app doesn’t read information correctly from Apple Health, it reports the wrong health score. For instance: 1) Even though I log over 101 ounces of water a day, Lifesum thinks I never drink water. 2) It misinterprets exercise, I do 1-2 hours of functional training, plus swimming and walking, every day. Lifesum doesn’t recognize this as moderate or strength training. 3) Unlike Apple Health, Lifesum “doubles up” exercise data reported from multiple sources (say, a workout app and my Apple Watch). Even though both report activity at the same time Lifesum treats this as two workouts, doubling my calorie burn.
While Lifesum does respond to some support requests, there is no notification... so you will only know about the response if you go back into the support menu and look for it. And after a year, all of the above issues remain, so I don’t get the impression the app is being actively improved.
I’m looking for an alternative.